Monday, 2 July 2018

The Arab world opens up to the truth about Palestinian violence and rejectionism.

This piece of
journalism reported on the Palestinian community suffering massive destruction
with over ten thousand displaced and many hundreds killed in artillery bombing
and aerial bombardments.

The
journalist, Kheir Allah, called it “one of the biggest tragedies in
Palestinian history, one that calls for widespread condemnation and
denunciation.”

Why was
there no “widespread condemnation and denunciation”?

Because this
wasn’t in the Gaza Strip, nor in Judea & Samaria in which the “Hate Israel”
mob could scream and shout. This was in a place called Yarmouk and the perpetrators
of this massacre were first the Syrian rebels, then ISIS, and then Russia-Iran
assisted Assad regime. When there is no Israel to blame, the Palestinian issue
is just a yawn.

But this
wasn’t the thrust of the article. The aim of the article was the silence of the
Palestinian leadership both in Ramallah and in Gaza City to this issue.

“Even the
Palestinian leadership has remained silent,” the journalist wrote. “Worst of all is Hamas chief,
Ismail Haniyeh, who went so far as to describe the Syrian regime as a ‘guardian
of Palestinian rights.’”

Kheir Allah stated
that Haniyeh’s silence about the deaths, injuries, and homelessness "revealed
that Hamas does not care at all about the rights of Palestinians.”

He went on to
question, “If Hamas is not bothered by the condition of Palestinian refugees
abroad, why should it care about those living in the Gaza Strip? Indeed, since
Hamas took over Gaza a decade ago, it has done nothing to improve the living conditions
of the population it controls. The only thing the people of Gaza have
experienced under Hamas rule is increased misery and isolation.”

The
surprising revelation was that this article did not appear in a pro-Israel Western
newspaper, but in the London edition of Al-Arab on June 23.

When you see
the Arab media exposing painful truths about the oppression of the Palestinian people
by their own leadership and the total disregard of their people living elsewhere
in the violent Arab world this really is newsworthy, but it is happening more
often in recent weeks.

Al-Arab
concluded its piece by warning Haniyeh that he is paying the price for aligning
itself with “the worst regimes in the region that have brought death and
destruction upon the people of Palestine.”

Slowly, but
surely, the Arab world is beginning to open up and express themselves truthfully
about the conflicted and divided Palestinian political leadership.

Hamas was
angry, and the Palestinian Authority was silent, when earlier this year the
Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel Al-Jubeir, described Hamas as an ‘extremist’ and
a “terrorist” group at a meeting of the European Parliament Foreign
Affairs Committee in Brussels.

Saudi
Arabian political researcher, Abdul Hameed al-Hakeem, in a tweet early in 2018,
called on Hamas to decide between what he called “the Iranian Nazi regime” and
peace with Israel.

The new
ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Sultan, after saying in April that “Israel
has a right to its own homeland” backed up that statement in stronger terms
a week later by saying that the Palestinians should accept peace proposals or “shut
up!”

“For the past 40 years, the Palestinian leadership has missed
opportunities again and again, and rejected all the offers it was given. It’s
about time that the Palestinians accept the offers, and agree to come to the
negotiating table — or they should shut up and stop complaining.”

There is
little doubt that much of the Arab world have had it with the whining and
violent rejectionism on both sides of the Palestinian political chasm. They
clearly see that Fatah and Hamas hate each other almost as much as they both
hate Israel, and they are fed up with them.

They have more pressing things to
worry about, such as Iran, and possibly peace with Israel.

Barry
Shaw is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’ He is
the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic
Studies.